


but do i want to say goodbye

by talking_tina



Category: Bandom, Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Bi-Curiosity, Character Study, Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1644359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talking_tina/pseuds/talking_tina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A character study of sorts into the specimen known as Tyler Joseph.</p><p>Or, Josh and Tyler in thirteen hundred words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but do i want to say goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first 21p work so please be gentle my darlings
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction using fictional characters based in the likenesses of real people. Never happened, and I do not own these names.

Josh thought he might be a little in love with the dude already.  
  
Not necessarily in, like, a gay way--Josh was twenty and pretty settled in his sexuality as a straight guy--but this kid was seriously stealing his heart.  
  
Tyler was shy at first, lingering a step behind Chris and smiling shyly when he was introduced to Josh, but after a few hours of conversation he was already wearing a soft smile and gesticulating excitedly to emphasize whatever point he was trying to make. His mannerisms were something else altogether, too; flamboyant but insecure, dainty yet clumsy.   
  
He was maybe an inch or so taller than Josh, but he was smaller overall--hip bones sharp as glass jutting out of his skinny, skinny waist and one of his small wrists adorned with three thin circlets of black ink. When he spoke, his eyebrows scrunched together and upwards just slightly, and his eyes--big, doe eyes with girlish lashes--widened just enough to keep the no-doubt attentive listener from looking away. They shone with an awkward genuineness that Josh felt like he hadn't seen in a long time. The corner of his smile softened the intensity of his gaze, though, made it blurry around the edges like a dream; he looked like he could use some sleep too, to be honest, if the bruise-colored bags under his eyes were anything to go by.  
  
His excitement over whatever he had been talking about deflated after a while; soon the conversation shifted and Chris was talking on another topic entirely. Tyler had shrunken back into Chris's shadow again, quiet, but he still smiled nervously at Josh when they made eye contact, tugging at his ragged sweatshirt sleeves with nimble fingers.  
  
"We should hang out sometime," Josh told him before he left, and by the time he got in his car Tyler had added himself to Josh's contact list.  
  
X  
  
Tyler, Josh discovered, was a lot funnier when he was one-on-one with someone. His movements lost their uncertainty—some of their daintiness, too—and fewer words ended in a lisp, or lilted up in a question. Instead, he ended every sentence with brittle sarcasm, but the remark always lost its poison when Tyler would follow it up mere moments later with a cheeky grin.  
  
His newfound confidence did little to build on his frame, though—he was still only five-something feet of small shoulders and bony limbs, slender fingers and a soft jaw line. The bags still haunting his eyes sometimes made it hard to focus on his smile, and Josh just really wished the dude would get some sleep.  
  
X  
  
Tyler could talk, sometimes, for hours on end.  
  
He was the kid that wouldn't shut up during sleepovers, the kid who continued to ponder the secrets of the universe long after his friends had drifted off to sleep. Josh stayed awake, though, had discovered that it had become difficult for him to fall asleep when he knew that Tyler was still awake and couldn't sleep.  
  
But Tyler talked; he talked about life and death and love and anxiety and fear _, always_ fear. It was the topic that managed to crop up every single night and it hurt Josh, a little, to hear in Tyler’s voice exactly how terrified he was, to hear exactly how much this emotion possessed him and terrorized him and haunted his sleep.  
  
Josh began to understand, maybe, why Tyler was so tired all the time.  
  
X  
  
It took Josh a while to realize that he had become Tyler's best friend.  
  
He wasn't quite sure when it happened, but he knew that when Tyler called him up at two in the morning for comfort after a bad dream (whispering into the phone so as not to wake Zack), that this wasn't something he did with anybody. He didn't tell just anybody about these dreams he had, these dreams about demons and nighttime and darkness and falling and that one dream he had about _The Catcher in the Rye_. He didn't tell just anybody how terrified he was of what that meant.   
Josh was okay with this.   
  
He would always be there to listen.  
  
X  
  
Tyler asked him, exactly once, about sexuality.  
  
Josh was taken a bit by surprise, because Tyler was twenty-two by this time, and had been through high school, had been through _college_ , and usually by this time dudes were pretty settled about what they did and didn't like.  
  
Josh voiced these thoughts to him the same night, and Tyler shrugged, said he _was_ settled, said that he _liked_ girls and liked Jenna and liked curved waists under his fingertips, but he hadn't thought about guys, not really, and was just kind of wondering, maybe, a little, what it was like. Because he wasn't _completely_ opposed to a relationship with a dude, because guys were cool and had nice voices and he liked the idea of being the one protected instead of being burdened with the title of “protector”.  
  
Josh had shrugged, said he hadn't thought about it, but then corrected himself because wait, he had. But it had been years ago, almost a decade since then, and he hadn't put much thought into it since.  
  
X  
  
They kissed, that night.  
  
It wasn't that exciting, really, and Josh was mostly just doing it for Tyler's benefit, but he was a bit curious himself; he hadn't experimented with guys since the seventh grade, and wondered if anything had changed since then.

They mostly hadn't, if he was honest--not that the kiss was bad, because Tyler had soft lips and a shy tongue and made pretty cute noises when Josh angled his head differently, but.  
  
But.  
  
Kissing boys didn't ignite the same fire in his chest as kissing girls did; it didn't make his heart pound, didn't make him wanna reach out and grab their waist and pull them closer, didn’t make him want to take charge and push boundaries and go further.  
  
X  
  
Tyler agreed, apparently.  
  
X

Josh spent a lot of the following days, however, thinking about that night. Not necessarily about the kiss in particular, or about Tyler’s sexuality, but instead about what Tyler had said about wanting to be protected instead of burdened with protector, about being tired, _so tired_ of responsibility and sometimes he would just like it if someone else handled things for a while.

Josh tried a little harder after that to make sure that Tyler got enough to eat, to make sure he got enough sleep and was in a good mindset to go out and talk to fans and didn’t do anything _too_ stupid, because Josh needed him too, after all.

X

“I’m so scared for those kids,” Tyler told him one day after a show, the two of them then safely tucked away in Josh’s bunk together. They had gone out to chat with some fans for an hour or so, shared some stories and taken pictures and signed the occasional CD. Josh could tell Tyler was tired, though, and they retreated to the bus early.

Josh frowned. “They’re really not kids, Ty.”

Tyler sighed, burrowed himself further into Josh’s side. “I’m still scared for them. They just—I just want them to be okay. I want them to stop hurting. It eats at me so much that we can’t do much more about it.”

Josh was silent for a moment, soaking in Tyler’s words. After a few moments he wrapped his arm around Tyler, brought him in closer to his side. “I’m pretty sure they think the same thing about you, dude. They’ll be okay as long as you are.”

Tyler’s quiet after that.

X

“Hey, Ty.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a good guy, you know that?”

Tyler laughs. “You too, J. You too.”


End file.
